PC: Cape to Casablanca instead of Cape to Cairo?

hey, all. i just wanted to get some second opinions on this idea of mine. in the current specs for one of my TLs, Britain gets Morocco instead of Egypt as a colony but has most of the same colonies from OTL. because of that, TTL's version of the Cape to Cairo Railway is built in mostly the same direction until it gets to about Lake Victoria and then turns northwest to get to Morocco, going across the Sahara.

that last part is what i want to get a plausibility check on. as i currently have it written, the railway is completed but turns out to be a wasted effort because the Sahara's weather patterns compromise the rails themselves, but also have it written that in the modern period there are proposals to rebuild it using artificial above-ground tunnels to protect the rails from the Sahara's sands.

what does everyone think about the plausibility of the rail being completed? would the conditions of the Sahara mean that "tunnels" are built earlier than i've suggested here? or d'y'all think they just wouldn't both trying to cross the Sahara?
 
Most of the Sahara is French territory though, also Lake Victoria is German territory before WWI.

Just to point out, why Britain went from Morocco instead of securing Suez (and its vital link to India)?
 
Most of the Sahara is French territory though, also Lake Victoria is German territory before WWI.

Just to point out, why Britain went from Morocco instead of securing Suez (and its vital link to India)?

i prefer to keep these questions self-contained because exactly this kind of thing usually derails these threads of mine and i never get a satisfactory answer, but it has to do with an alternate Napoleonic Wars and Scramble for Africa where France gets Egypt from the former and Germany doesn't participate in the latter

i'd had some thoughts on France controlling most of the Sahara, the simple answer being that they do NOT appreciate their territory being infringed on and it leads to some wars (including by proxy). that's another part of why i wanted to ask for a plausibility check ;)
 
Tunnels in the Sahara don't sound quite too feasible, given that a lot of the Sahara's bedrock is also riddled with aquifers and caves, alongside the conventional questions of ventilation prior to electrical trains, the logistics of building anything in the Sahara.

Cape to Cairo was a thing because of the Nile making it significantly easier to cross the desert belt. It seems unlikely anyone would consider bank-rolling such a large waste of money as the Cape to Casablanca, even forgoing the fact that train tracks will be screwed over in the Sahara. Even if there is contiguous British territory from Morocco to the Cape, unless the Brits gain the Nile (In which case one would have no need for Cas-Cap railroad), the hostile desert will prevent truly effective movement from the North to the South.

This scenario sounds like Morocco is in effect, used to flank France's continental system, and will likely be geared towards bases for Europe rather than towards southward expansion, perhaps even a simple protectorate rather than an outright colony.
 
thanks for your input ;) i think i'll put Cape to Casablanca on the backburner for the time being, then
 
Haha, was gonna come and get involved but someone already quoted my thread. What can I do...

Basically, you cannot get away with the UK just getting Morocco. They'd need Algeria as well, or at least Tunisia and go way deeper from Nigeria to control the desert.

The problem you'll face is that the Scramble for Africa came from very specific circumstances (France got a bloody nose in 1871 and decided to take it out on the Africans. The UK couldn't let the froggies get a whole continent to themselves so they started as well and soon everybody was doing it. Slight oversimplification but...)

So not wanting to derail the thread and all but an alt-Nappy might kill all that. There were however exploration efforts through the Royal Societies mid-XIXth OTL but that's not where the money was. Money was in the Indies and China. You needed the circumstances above to really get the ball rolling. But that's just for your consideration.

On a more technical aspect, a Cape to Casablanca railroad would be very complicated as this is way longer than the original C2C. A longer distance means it's easier to just use boats to go around and go limited railroads going inland on a case by case basis.
The French tried (and failed) a trans-saharian precisely because almost all their African possessions were in West Africa, separated by the Sahara. It made a lot of sense for them to build it. It wasn't a nice imperialistic consideration like the Cape to Cairo but a strategic one. This meant better access to the interior and a huge consolidation of their possession from the settlement colony of Algeria. It meant a very direct way to Mali from Marseilles.

I don't think it would make as much sense to get something continuous from Cape to Morocco. It would be fancy and all but not that useful. You'd probably get a East-West railway, huge port facilities around Namibia and big port in Morocco

That's my take on it anyway :)
 
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